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Laraine Day, ‘B+ Movie’ Star, Dies at 87

Laraine Day with Leo Durocher in 1947. In 1952, Ms. Days book, Day With the Giants, described life as a baseball wife.Credit
Associated Press

Laraine Day, a popular actress who appeared in almost two dozen MGM movies during Hollywood’s Golden Age, notably as the nurse Mary Lamont in a series of Dr. Kildare movies, died Saturday in Ivins, Utah. She was 87.

Her death, at the home of her daughter, Gigi Bell, in Ivins was announced by her publicist, Dale Olson. She had moved to Utah in March after the death of her husband of 47 years, the producer Michel M. Grilikhes.

For several years Ms. Day was also often called “the first lady of baseball” for her earlier marriage to Leo Durocher, the Hall of Fame manager of what were then the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants.

Never a major star, Ms. Day was relegated to what she called “B+ movies” at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1939 to 1945. She was almost the victim of an ax murderer in “Fingers at the Window” (1942), was married to a traitor in “A Yank on the Burma Road” (1942) and served as the intrepid newspaper publisher Edward G. Robinson’s girl Friday in “Unholy Partners” (1941).

Ms. Day captured roles in A movies only when she was loaned to other studios. In 1940, Alfred Hitchcock borrowed her to star with Joel McCrea in the spy thriller “Foreign Correspondent.” RKO had her play the virtuous society girl who reforms a draft-dodging, gambling ship owner (Cary Grant) in “Mr. Lucky” (1943). And Paramount borrowed her at the request of the director Cecil B. DeMille to play the steadfast nurse at the side of Gary Cooper’s heroic doctor in “The Story of Dr. Wassell” (1944), based on the rescue of a dozen wounded American sailors during the first days of World War II.

By the time Mr. DeMille was planning “Dr. Wassell,” Ms. Day had played a nurse, Mary Lamont, seven times in the “Dr. Kildare” films. “After seeing me in so many Kildares, I was naturally the only one who could play a nurse and knew the proper instruments,” Ms. Day said.

Starring Lew Ayres as Dr. Kildare and Lionel Barrymore as Dr. Gillespie, the chief of surgery, the Kildare films were tremendously successful. Ms. Day described her character as “good, marvelous, true, honest.” For years after Nurse Lamont was hit by a truck while rushing to buy furniture in “Dr. Kildare’s Wedding Day” (1941), people would stop Ms. Day on the street and ask, “Why did you die, Mary Lamont?” The movies became the basis of the television drama “Dr. Kildare” in the 1960s.

Though some sources give Ms. Day’s birthday as Oct. 13, 1917, the more likely date, and the one given on her death, is 1920. One of eight children, including a twin brother, she was born Laraine Johnson in Roosevelt, Utah, to a prosperous Mormon family. When he was 15, her father had acted as a Mormon Paul Revere, riding to warn polygamists that the federal marshals were coming so that they could hide their wives. Her great-grandfather, three of his six wives, and a few dozen of his 52 children had been early settlers in San Bernardino, Calif. The Johnsons followed two of their older sons to the area when Ms. Day was 9 years old.

Photo

Ms. Day in 1939.Credit
MGM

Ms. Day started her film career with a bit part in a four-handkerchief melodrama of maternal love, “Stella Dallas” (1937). She was signed by MGM in 1939, and her name was immediately changed; the studio already had a Rita Johnson under contract.

Before long, she had one line before dying in a plane crash in “Tarzan Finds a Son” (1939) and committed suicide in “I Take This Woman” (1940), starring Spencer Tracy and Hedy Lamarr. Loaned to Edward Small Productions when Frances Dee collapsed on the set of “My Son, My Son!” (1940), she killed herself again rather than ruin Brian Aherne’s life. The performance led theater owners to pick her as an outstanding new actress, and Life magazine called her “a major young Hollywood personality.”

But she felt MGM ultimately failed her. When asked what was the most memorable thing about working at the studio, Ms. Day replied, “I guess getting paid, because I never got apart that would have done anything for me.”

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Ms. Day’s marriage to Mr. Durocher, in 1947, became grist for headlines for months. She married him in Texas, one day after being granted an interlocutory decree — a temporary court order, now seldom used — setting forth terms of divorce from her first husband, the singer Ray Hendricks, in California. Because that divorce would not be final for a year, a California superior court judge tried to revoke it. The solution, months later, allowed her to stay married in 47 of the 48 states but ruled that cohabiting with her new husband in California would be bigamy.

In 1946, Ms. Day had signed a contract at RKO for one picture a year for five years at a salary of $100,000 a movie, but only two films were made. She played a psychopathic killer in “The Locket” (1946) and a rich girl who is disinherited when she marries a railroad builder (John Wayne) in “Tycoon” (1947). Her last significant film roles were in “The High and the Mighty” (1954), the first of the airplane disaster movies, and “The Third Voice” (1960).

She also had a long career acting in television, from performing on “Playhouse 90” in the 1950s to guest appearances on “Murder, She Wrote” in the 1980s.

Ms. Day’s survivors include two daughters with Mr. Grilikhes, Gigi Bell and Dana Grilikhes Nassi; and a son and daughter with Mr. Durocher, Christopher and Michelle; her twin brother, Lamar, of Chico, Calif., and numerous grandchildren.

During her marriage to Mr. Durocher (who died in 1991), she was the host of “Day With the Giants,” a 15-minute television interview program broadcast before New York Giants home games. She published a book in 1952 about her experiences as a baseball wife, also titled “Day With the Giants.”

After her divorce from Mr. Durocher in 1960, she told an interviewer that she had never liked baseball. “When our relationship was over,” she said “so was my relationship with baseball.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C13 of the National edition with the headline: Laraine Day, ‘B+ Movie’ Star, Dies at 87. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe